American Rhetoric

By Paddy Kelly

Through shear dint of effort, Ronald Lump the third, now in his fourth and last term as president, had with tireless campaigning and unprecedented cooperation in both the House and the Senate, been able to whittle away at the 3% who controlled 97% of the wealth. He got it down to 1%. Worse yet, of the 47 candidates who intend to run for office to replace him none are qualified.

America was in trouble. Again.

However it is in Central Middleville, Ohio, a place where everyday life is abnormally normal, there resides a real hero. A human cog in a soulless system whose only dream is to get out of the dingy one room apartment he's lived in all his life. A savior that can possibly deliver the American people from the shackles of the two party system and the havoc it has reeked on the American landscape for so long.

Thaddeus Enoch Pervers, a lowly assembly line worker unintentionally sets out on a political adventure the likes of which could only happen in the U.S. With political absurdities unimagined in Swift’s time Thaddeus, after accidently filing out the wrong form at his local Department of Motor Vehicles, mistakenly winds up sucked up into the convoluted American political system.

Politics was never in Thaddeus' plans, but it was in his destiny. Inadvertently tossed into the political arena due to the misfiled form, Pervers is discovered by a devious group of supercentenarians who promise to buy him a senate seat if he'll act as their front man for their political interests.

The novel American Rhetoric, a dark parody of the two party system, offers a glimpse of one possible future for The United States of America.

*Politics. From the Greek 'poly' meaning many and 'tics' meaning a parasitic, blood sucking leech who lives off others.

*(Translation approximate)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fiction4All
• Release date: Nov 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370762422

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

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AMERICAN society had shifted in the intervening years since, having her prison record expunged by presidential decree, Helen Cliton had been appointed Secretary of State and Ronald Lump the Third, Great-Great Grandson of the New York real-estate baron, had, after changing the law, won his fourth consecutive White House term.

The last of the law suits following the mass suicide fad which had swept the nation after Helen's Great-Great Aunt Hillary had lost the election had finally been settled.

Lump, on the other hand, had managed to finally tackle the fact that 3% of Americans owned or directly controlled 97% of the wealth of that country.

Through sheer dint of effort, plenty of hard work, tireless campaigning efforts and unprecedented cooperation in both the House and the Senate, he was able to whittle that 3% down to 1%.

Legislation was in the pipeline to tackle that annoying little 1% as soon as Congress could raise the funds to clean up the miles and miles of unused bricks, mortar and scaffolding littering the highways, roads and prairie land along the U.S.-Mexican border.

Cruising overhead in one of the new multi-billion dollar hovercrafts, (which cost just under $125,000 to build) and which reduced the trans-continental voyage from New New York to Lost Angeles, no longer part of the 60th state, from three and a half hours to three hours and eleven minutes, President Lump could see that much of the landscape was still dotted with two story split levels, ranch homes and tasteless prefabricated houses like the kind seen all over Texas, Louisiana and most of the Bible Belt. But factories more or less dominated the land mass of most of America. All of course except for Arkansas, after all no one wanted to live there before the ECOLI, why would anyone go there now?

In a radically changing world it was comforting to know some traditions remained.

The overall map of the country had changed as well. Several of the northern states had been sold to Canada to raise revenue for the Twelfth Annual Congressional Bailout while the Hawaiian Islands now belonged to the Chinese having been traded for a treaty where-by the Chinese government agreed to stop hacking U.S. technology, stealing America's industrial plans and selling them to the largest country in the world the Ukraino-Russia Federation. Some found an odd poetic justice in this seeing as it was primarily Asian and Eastern European engineers who, although hired by the Americans, actually designed and built most of that technology.

This massive sell-off of real estate was generally accepted as part of the cause of what people now referred to as the Great Economic Collapse of Industry.

ECOLI for short.

To maintain the status quo and allow the random but steady price inflation the western world had come to rely on to motivate its economy, the citizens of the U.S. and now most of the rest of the world, had come also to depend on artificially manufactured food stuffs produced by multi-international conglomerates such as Consolidated Refined Agricultural Products which boasted over 500 facilities nation-wide processing, manufacturing and distributing CRAP products throughout the world.

SPAM Plus was one of their biggest money makers.

There were other changes too.

For example various social sub-orders had arisen and were branded with certain names, names propagated largely by the pop press through NewsCorps. These names became a convenient way to refer to the few remaining groups of people with political opinions, people who had not completely given up on the political system altogether. A political system which had grown like a mold on six month old Gouda as it crept across the land.

Collectively these people were known as the Logics.

The smallest of the Logics was the group who based their political viewpoints and opinions on logic, reasoning and established knowledge.

They were legally banned from public speaking when, one year when a Logical speaker, a physics professor, tried to explain gravity at a famous university. His explanation was dismissed as patriarchal ad riots broke out.

This Logical group was sarcastically labelled by the press as 'The Knowitalls'. They were so small a group that more people had claimed to have seen Bigfoot then to have actually met a Logical.

NewsCorps was the consolidated news wire service, which controlled and was the sole nation-wide supplier of info-tainment. What people used to call the 'news'.

T.V. execs found that ratings tripled when they mixed reality T.V. with news broadcasts and so info-tainment was born.

The president and corporate CEO of NewsCorps, Lush Limburger, Ph.D., (an honorary award), through his broadcasts had coined and there-by sanctioned most of the monikers now in common use.

'NewsCorps; Lush with the slush!' Could be heard dozens of times a day on radios, televisions and monitors across the nation.

Skilled at broadcasting in only two emotions, anger and indignation, combined with his ‘clever’ labelling of opposing political groups was considered the primary reason Limburger was consistently voted News Man of the Year by the United Associated Press International or the UAPI.

The UAPI, an organization which maintained their name despite the fact the title, News Man of the Year, could only be awarded to a member of the American press who was an active member of the UAPI, were the primary fundraisers for the Lush Limburger Program.

All foreign generated news was highly restricted and could only be accessed if an American was out of the country or on vacation in exotic places like Toronto or Detroit, which now belonged to Canada which meant one needed a passport to go there which in turn meant that few Americans went there.

Subsisting largely on hate rhetoric and creating discontent in those of lower mentality, Limburger's eight hour daily show focused largely on casting aspersions at the likes of Doctors Without Borders, (who he branded as 'bleeding heart socialists'), teachers, ('liberal morons'), and Planned Parenthood, ('condoms are the root of all the problems in our education system!') He particularly railed against Planned Parenthood because he argued, due to the fact they encouraged young people to use condoms they were the primary propagators of unsafe sex. Bumper stickers proclaiming: CONDOMS CILL!! could be had free of charge from Limburger's radio studios.

Limburger had his favorites too, like the Blinders.

These were the ones in the country who were shackled with the philosophy that the U.S., without reservation, was the greatest country in the world, despite the fact it was fourth in economic production behind China, Russia and Brazil, 26th on the U.N's Safest Places to Live list and 47th overall in education.

When cornered as to the flaws in the 'America is the greatest country' approach, the Blinder's comeback was, 'Maybe it's not a perfect system but it's the best imperfect system in the world.' Finally when confronted by the facts of their government's broken legal and judicial system, their homerun swing was, 'It's not a perfect system, but it's the best we got.'

As the democrats spent more and more money on gun control and the republicans more and more on fire arms promotion, there were dwindling amounts for less important social programs such as education and medicine.

As a result, the failing I.Q.'s of the nation's students was more than just an international embarrassment, it had become a real social problem compounded by the fact that 68% tested couldn't point out the U.S. on a standard map, (half even when it was labelled).

However, it was the teachers who suffered the most.

When the teacher's mandatory, unpaid five month Summer holidays became law, and their wages were reduced accordingly, some quit or were forced to take second jobs such as sanitation technicians in the factories. Those with higher degrees could find work as waste disposal collection engineers for the food service or housekeeping industries.

Parents and relatives did what they could to help the teachers by going down to the Federal Unified Collection points and donating canned food, old bits of clothing and slightly used body armor or bullet resistant clothing. These latter items had become popular when school shootings had been elevated to a national past time by the popular reality game show Classroom Body Count. However, despite such irresistible perks such as free body armor, the attrition rates of the teachers back to the factories and other industries had reached an all-time high.

Another side effect of the dilapidated education system was the gradual deterioration of the language itself.

Wiked-Period, the online ensikloopedea, had come to be the last word in academic reference, despite the fact there were no redundant checks on the information posted and anybody could pretty much write and post anything they wanted. Even though most of those who wrote on-line information sites could no longer write very well, especially after the highly publicized Wong Case.

Michelle Wong, an undergraduate student at Cal Tech, submitted her undergrad thesis entirely in text speak. When the department chair failed her, she resorted to that most American of cure-alls, she sued. In separate but equal law suits she sued the state, sued the university, the college, the department, the department chair, her professor and the librarian for referring her to a volume entitled, A Hndbk For Txt Abrvs.

As U.S. law is predicated primarily on stare decisis, or precedent, after she won the first case she won all the other cases. On the seven figure settlement she abandoned her studies in English Literature and her goal to teach English at Harvard and retired to the former Hawaiian island of Oahu, now New Beijing, where she sits in the sun sipping Mai Tais and texting her 600 cousins.

As most of the computer programmers who worked in the industry had little or no English, this made things difficult for the less than 37,000 native speakers of English, who were still left in the U.S., mostly sprinkled around the central states.

These events had in turn impacted so heavily on the nation that not only had the language itself suffered, but it was impossible to get a ham sandwich, a hot dog or a cup of coffee anywhere in the United States if all you spoke was Standard American English, as Spanglish was now the official national language.

The demise of the English language was not sudden but gradual over a period of several generations with changes thought to be too small or insignificant to matter. For example, as there were only three grammatical articles in the language, these were the first casualties of the undeclared war.

The Brits had long ago ceased using 'the' for most things uttering phrases such as, Me mother's in 'ospital, again! Costin' me arm in a leg so it is! Inconsiderate bitch!

If you could get over the fact that they spoke as if they had stones in their mouths and lived in deathly fear of dropping one and you could hack your way through any of the thousands of their cryptic dialects, you would find they were a fairly intelligible people. However Americans, being enamored, (enamored), with the British accent soon followed suit and communication suffered further.

The Aussies, Kiwis and South Africans hadn't fared much better in terms of preserving English. Having been isolated so long from the rest of civilization they had developed what they mistakenly believed to be their own form of 'proper' English.

What with 'roo' for kangaroo, 'bottling his bloods worth' to mean someone who was very helpful and 'G'day' for hello with 'Hooroo' for good-bye, people in the civilized countries were generally dumbfounded at how, beyond sex and eating, people below the equator communicated at all.

Except for the persistent inability to pronounce the word 'out', or any derivation with the vowel combination of O and U, the Canadians remained relatively unaffected as, not wanting to cause trouble, they were game to go along with anything everybody else said.

Prepositions were the next to be infected with the communicative cancer which insidiously metastasized until nearly all of these linking words had been eaten away save for a few such as 'to', now spelled exclusively 'too', too include the number, too.

Fifteen after eight, for example became just fifteen eight. The confusion caused by fifteen before or until eight as opposed to after eight was eliminated by saying, It is forty-five minutes seven. Which in turn, of course, meant that times like seven twenty had to be said to be forty minutes six.

All this, predictably, wreaked havoc on daylight savings time which, due to the economy, people only had to work a three to four hour work day anyway, and so was simply eliminated.

The U. S. GNP hit rock bottom.

So, much like the Celtic peoples who, thousands of years ago had been split into several nations, lost contact with one another and quickly fell into a situation whereby, even though they all spoke the Celtic language, they were completely unable to communicate with one another giving us the Welsh, Scots and Irish, the people who came to temporarily occupy Nurtheren Urop and the Amerikas, the English speaking, Anglo peoples drifted further apart.

Җ

Every school student of course knows about these events. You get all this when you take Chemercology in high school. Chemistry, Biology and American History combined, a course favored by most school districts to save money by hiring only one teacher in lieu of three.

Also since no one could pass high school chemistry or biology and history was eliminated as a serious area of study and struck from the curriculum during the Olson Twins Administration, few now know of the bleak back story of how the country of The United States of America arrived at the situation in which it currently found itself. Allow me to elucidate.

(For members of the G.O.P. or D.N.C., that means: to explain.)

THE BB STACKERS

CHAPTER TWO

Җ

Middleville, Ohio could, in reality, be called an average American town. Some would label it middle of the road, run of the mill or politically centrist. It was all of these. At least by average standards.

People went to work, paid their mortgages, medical bills and grocery bills. They took out second mortgages to pay for the school tuitions for their kids so that they too could graduate college. Graduate college and get jobs, buy houses, pay their mortgages and in turn have kids they could send off to school, be disappointed in and who would grow up to resent them.

All this, of course, was done on credit.

Ever since the onset of the Economic Collapse of Industry, ECOLI for short, the good citizens of Middleville dutifully supported American industry by buying Japanese and German cars so folks like the United Auto Workers could still get their government mandated subsidy payments to keep the U.S. economy afloat and prevent it from collapsing altogether.

The subsidy was needed so that the United Auto Workers rank and file could still show up at the near empty factories, turn on the lights, oil the rusting machinery, rearrange the office furniture and sweep and mop the floors before closing up for the afternoon. This of course only took the massive work force a few hours each day but following the complete collapse of negotiations between the government appointed negotiators and the UAW union reps, under President Oboomboom, fifteen hours a week was all the time the factory workers were willing to put in.

Other industries hadn't fared as well.

The farmers, for instance, who now in spite of only comprising 1.3% of the population but thanks to scientific advancements, were producing 100% of all the food for the country with an annual surplus of between 35 to 37%. Said scientific advancements however, had been largely mishandled by the former Paris Hilton administration, the first female president of the United States.

Though she had been legally elected on the imaginary 'Glass Ceiling' platform and served her full term, Helen Cliton had been disqualified as the first female president by The Guinness Book of World Records on the grounds that her actual gender could never be officially confirmed. Even when her brigade of lawyers argued that gender was a patriarchal construct.

The nation's farmers, thanks to negotiations led by the Republican controlled People Who Plant Things in the Ground for a Living Union, were paid to destroy all their excess crops.

Donating the millions of tons of excess wheat, barley and flax to the starving of the third world nations was voted down in Congress on the premise that it was a step towards socialism which, as everybody knew was the first step on the road to communism. Consequently, the logic went, those poor unfortunates of the Third World would only come to depend on the unlimited generosity of the good people of the U.S. of A. and therefore would never be motivated enough to develop their own, independent farming industries.

Burning the crops and letting a few foreign populations starve to death was, logically speaking, for their own good.

In fairness Congress had however, passed an appropriations bill where-by said, starving third world countries could purchase their own farm and factory equipment from the U.S. on a kind of lend-lease arrangement. After all such a scheme had worked before.

The generosity of the Congress even extended so far as to offer to offset the multi-trillion dollar price tag for the equipment by extending the lease over a 500 year period so as to make the payments smaller.

Җ

It was here in Central Middleville there resided a humble factory worker, Thaddeus Enoch Pervers.

Pervers was a tall man, so tall that in all the years since finishing the eighth grade no house he ever inhabited had seen or owned a stepladder. In fact when his public school, pubescent peers had all found part time employment with delivery jobs or paper routes, young Thaddeus earned his weekend movie money by changing light bulbs in neighbor's houses or retrieving stranded cats from low hanging tree branches.

'Stilts', 'Tall Boy' and 'Ichabod Crane' were but a few of the derogatory insults suffered by young Pervers as a school boy. His mother thought of him as more of an Abraham Lincoln. His father, unfamiliar with B. F. Skinner’s theoretical concepts of child encouragement and himself of average height, didn't involve himself much in the young boy's school affairs.

Thaddeus’ seventeen inch shoes had to be handmade and since all the trades in America had died off years ago, replaced by imported goods, it was only by the skilled cobblers in Mexico that he was able to buy footwear. As a consequence his bedroom closet was always stocked with no less than fourteen pairs of shoes. Shoes for all occasions. Informal, formal, semi-formal. School, casual, and recreational. Recreations such as basketball, a sport in which he eventually found it impossible to find opponents to play against.

He nearly never ate large full meals but took his food as nature and natural selection had intended for all mammals, eating multiple small feedings throughout the day. His constant but innocuous munching annoyed some, but all-in-all was the only manner in which he could derive any culinary pleasure, that is from small but frequent meals.

His wife, in contrast, a short stout woman, grazed constantly throughout the day.

This contrast in morphology caused Thaddeus to quietly keep the framed picture of his tall slender self and his short, plump wife in his nightstand drawer rather than on display. Standing side-by-side one was reminded of the Italian first person singular or the fourth moon of Jupiter, Io.

Thaddeus worked as a Steenberger micro heating unit calibrator for the Brubaker Ball Bearing Corporation, in Brubaker, Ohio. The Brubaker Manufacturing, one of the country's dozen corporations which owned the thousands of factories that now crowded the American landscape, had the world-wide contract to manufacture the ball bearings for the failsafe mechanisms in automobile safety belts.

It was Thaddeus's job to carefully regulate the temperature in the micro oven of the von Rollen machine which produced the calcium carbonate necessary to produce the mineral Arsonol which was needed to polish the seatbelt bearings to within the .0001 mm required so that they could fall into the little slots in the slotted locking mechanism which, on the car's impact, would lock the belt in place and save the driver and/or passenger's life.

Due to the new laser activated anti-collision sensors and the improved air bags installed in every car that now rolled off the automated lines, a mechanism which shut down and diverted any vehicle on a collision course with anything, the ball bearing mechanisms at Brubaker had become redundant and no longer served any purpose. They were as useful as a leaky boat in a storm. Tits on a bull. A democrat and a republican trying to agree on a congressional bill.

Useless.

But because Brubaker was the nephew of an uncle twice removed of the district Republican representative, he was allowed to keep his factories. For an annual contribution to the appropriate political cause of course.

Thaddeus was neither political nor apolitical. He wasn't a liberal nor was he a conservative. He was never sure what a NeoCon was so he had no interest in being one of those. Back in high school he had read how Communists, although they had devised a secret way to breed their children without the horns and forked tails most Americans had heard about, they in fact did used to have them at one time. Mostly back in the Nineteen Fifties.

He had no blood relations in the Republican Party that he knew of, and so couldn't engage in sexual relations with them to earn his party card in the GOP. Therefore the certified incest requirement to become a member of the Republican Party was an iron clad barrier.

He had also read up on Democrats and how they were always speechin' about 'the people' and 'helping the people' and 'doing things for the people' which sounded a lot like watered down communism to Thaddeus. Due to this and the fact that he read somewhere most of the money the Dems collected in taxes to help other people was unaccounted for, he decided not to grow up to be a Democrat.

Thus, back during his secondary education, when exploring political parties as possibilities in which to spend his parenthood once he reached the age of procreation, he came across nothing that attracted him. So he moved on to other pursuits content in the knowledge that he hadn't completely wasted those thirty-seven minutes that afternoon in the school library and still had time to go home and play a couple of hours of GTA.

He was particularly excited that day because version, 87 had just been released by CRAP Games Inc.

Thus Thaddeus had grown up with no strong political feelings, leanings or inclinations in any real direction which his friends or family could ever discern. To this day he didn't read either of the national newspapers, listen to the national radio station and only passively followed any of the major league games of football or baseball.

He had no interest in cars, as many young boys do, but he learned to drive just as SUV's were no longer practical and fell from their place of prestige in the middle class as the American soccer craze died down. After all, soccer was a European sport which they called football, and football without using your hands had always been considered a little suspicious to many Americans. Too socialist by their reckoning which was borderline communistic.

Thaddeus' wife, Prudence and he had a seventeen year old son. Due to the fact that tangerine flavored Jell-O was Prudence's favorite food, they named their son Taranjello. Had he been born a girl he would have been named Orangejello for his father's favorite food.

Taranjello was a good kid but his incessant bumbling was lovingly mistaken by his parents for hidden potential. Like the time he accidently overheard his father complaining about the skyrocketing cost of gasoline and so decided to help out by filling the gas tank with water. To save on buying more gas. So his dad could get to work.

This bumbling at times was costly but his hidden genius, his parents fervently believed, would no doubt manifest itself when the time was right. After all it was probably only a mere 15 to 16 year phase he was going through.

Now married and having made the Potential Future Homeowner's List in the government's Office of Residence Registry, the Pervers would have a place of their own soon. Just as soon as someone died and a home came open so they could have their name entered in the annual lottery. They currently awaited word for an interview but as the main office of the O.R.R. in Middleville had been shut down due to lack of available rental space, there was still no word.

Even though funding had run out for the Republican sponsored San Diego to Houston barrier wall project and Americans were flooding over the border into the Free Republic of Mexico, housing was still scarce.

This good news about the potential to win the lottery provided some comfort to the Pervers because with the allotted 1.5 children, the one room apartment they shared was getting more and more crowded. The .5 meant the Pervers had also made the waiting list to have a second child should the first born prove too intelligent, too productive, or threaten to make a meaningful contribution to society without proper government approval.

However, it was decided, after Taranjello's last school IQ evaluation, there would probably not be a second child.

Overall Thaddeus Enoch Pervers led a normal, Middleville existence. Thaddeus's life was abnormally normal to the point people would comment at parties and functions about the Pervers.

I hope we never become that normal! They would remark. To which the person they were with would usually reply, Yeah, that's abnormal! I'm glad we're just normally normal!

Except for his Friday night double American cheese-food burger with a side order of American Freedom fries and a Diet Coke Extra Lite, at the local Bowl-A-Rama where his team, The BB Stackers, would practice for the thrice yearly, bi-annual Bowl Off, life was almost painfully normal.

The BB Stackers, Thaddeus, Joe, Bob and Fred were all sons of former assembly line workers back when the factories were still operational. They came by their jobs, in this time of record unemployment, through adherence of the hard hat mentality passed down to them by their grandfathers through their fathers and which they would in turn faithfully pass on to their children. Tradition was still held as a sacred value by these simple folk and therefore not subject to violation by influx of so called 'progressive' ideas.

200 proud years of tradition unaffected by change or progress! was the proud motto of the Beaver Lodge, proud sponsors of The BB Stackers, Thaddeus, Joe, Bob and Fred's proud bowling team. And to prove it a huge beaver was proudly spread wide across the backs of their baby blue and gold, silk bowling shirts.

They were some proud beavers.

It was just past half past eight one Friday evening down at the Bowl-O-Rama and Joe had just bowled his fifth consecutive strike which boosted his score to 150 and put him even with Thaddeus, Bob and Fred. Feeling a bit thirsty, and in an unusual deviation from the norm, Thaddeus decided on a second Diet Coke Extra Lite.

He excused himself from the bench where he sat next to Fred, across from where Joe sat next to Bob, where they always sat, and meandered up to the snack bar next door in the Greek Diner.

He was compelled to stand in line as several members of the Youth for Change in America were ahead of him. The YFCA were having their monthly mixer.

They were a non-political youth organization designed to inform young people of how the American political system worked. Essentially the group encouraged the youngsters not to waste their youth trying to change things that couldn't be changed. That could be done later by somebody else.

Old age and treachery will always overcome youth and enthusiasm! read the motto on the backs of their jackets.

As he stood in line he overheard a couple of Blinders in the booth next to him discussing the latest NewsCorp broadcast emanating from the big screen, vapor T.V. hovering above the door to the men's toilet.

Although most of the country was occupied watching one of the popular reality or game shows at that hour, some like those in the El Greco Greek Diner which occupied the east half of the Bowl-A-Rama, were watching the Eight O'clock NewsCorps Info-tainment Show. The smartly appointed studio set, from where the show was being broadcast, featured a well groomed, well lighted and well quaffed, perfectly postured digital announcer with just a touch of grey to add respectability. With a Walter Cronkite -like staccato voice he was announcing an announcement.

The twelfth consecutive twenty-five year ban on the findings of the Warren Commission have finally expired and the results were today given to a senate sub-committee which has released its findings.

CUT TO: Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy the 17th standing at a dais in the Senate. He spoke with a thick Bostonian dialect.

On closer examination of theCIA’s enhancement of the Zapruder film and accompanying testimony it has been determined that the JFK assassination mystery has been solved!

It has been determined that President John F. Kennedy actually shot himself!

The tragic accident occurred while the president was apparently mishandling a side arm which belonged to one of his Secret Service body guards. This conclusion is based on the evidence that the bullet entered the president's head from the front, exited the back and made a measurable bullet-sized hole, in the head.

The Zapruder film clearly shows, at the moment he is shot, the Glock 9mm being thrown from the president's hand and that is when, through quick, split second thinking and cat-like reflexes, Jackie Kennedy, the President's alleged, espoused wife, climbed out and onto the back of the limousine to retrieve the weapon.

RETURN TO STUDIO:

There you have it! Conclusive evidence indeed that